Monthly Archives: December 2005

One thing we didn’t do when posting about the status of the calendar extension XPI was explicitly say what our browser strategy would be. This has become more of an issue since the release of Firefox 1.5, as people who have upgraded from Firefox 1.0x no longer have the option of using calendar.xpi.
We do care about having a good calendaring integration story for the browser, but we’re still trying to figure out what we think that should be. One way of looking at it is that there are really a couple of pieces here: one involves supporting calendaring on the web (e.g. good hCalendar & ICS handling, other integration hooks for HTML calendaring software); the other is for full-fledged calendar management (a la Lightning or Sunbird).
One possible solution for the calendar management piece might be to support Lightning in Firefox. Another option would be simply to have good linkage and handoff to Sunbird (or whatever your system calendar app happens to be). Or perhaps the management/web split suggested above is not the best one, and there are other, better ways to handle these issues. Please feel free to comment with suggestions and thoughts.
In any case, we’ve started thinking about and discussing these things, but we probably won’t be able to put enough time into this to lay out a real roadmap until after Lightning 0.1 ships. In the meantime, we’d like to suggest that folks who have been using the calendar extension consider using Sunbird, either version 0.2 or version 0.3 alpha 1, depending on your level of risk tolerance. Additionally, if you are currently a Firefox Calendar user and like that setup so much that you’re not willing to switch to Sunbird, we’d like to hear about why that is. Please leave comments…

The following bugs have had fixes checked in for them since the last Status Update. Due to the landing of the ‘new views’ you should hopefully start to notice more ‘Both’ bugs being fixed than before, since Sunbird and Lightning now (almost) share their view-code.

It’s probably also important to point out that the landing of the new views simultaneously fixed a large number of outstanding bugs. Searching for all of these bugs is somewhat difficult, but this list should give you a good idea of them.

There are still currently 18 identified regressions from the new views landing (6 of these have patches awaiting review). This list of bugs can be viewed here. Additionally, the following regression has appeared in Sunbird since 0.3a1 was released:

Bug 320266 – Many “Failed to load XPCOM Component:” info bubbles in the js-console when starting a new profile.

Those of you that have been following Sunbird development closely have probably heard some mention of the ‘new views’. This refers to a set of xml files that create a new set of day/week and month views. Lightning has already been using these files, but in order to make them usable in Sunbird substantial changes needed to be made to the current codebase. The entire team has been putting in a lot of work on Bug 297934 in order to accomplish this. This afternoon, they landed.

We need your help

These changes were far too big to do perfectly. Tomorrow’s build, which will include the new views, will be very buggy. Many of the bugs have already been anticipated and filed. However, many others likely remain unknown. Those interested in testing these new views can help out greatly by providing specific, reproducable bug reports. Please do NOT comment about the regressions in the new-views bug. We are tracking all of the regressions from this landing in Bug 321164. If you find another regression, please file the bug and make it block this tracking bug.

New hackers

With the landing of these new views, now might be a good time for anyone who has considered trying their hand at hacking calendar code to jump in. Some of the regressions created by this bug will be rather difficult, but others will make for very good first bugs. Those interested in helping out may find the following (works-in-progress) pages useful:

Please be patient with us as we try to iron out all the problems from this landing. In the end, it should make your Sunbird experience much better. For instance, the day and week views already offer one of the most requested features, inline-editing. Also, in these views, dragging and dropping is back. Landing these views also allows the Lightning and Sunbird development processes to be much more united, so hopefully they will move more quickly.